I’m a little concerned about Herman Cain’s manifest lack of foreign policy chops. Nevertheless, it’s pretty clear that, for Americans committed to American exceptionalism, healthy and fair capitalism, fighting against Islamic terrorism, and strong borders, even the weakest Republican candidate is still going to be better than Barack Obama:

I continue to plan to cast my vote for Candidate ABO — Anyone But Obama.

Thomas Friedman, one of the leading lights of the NYT and more profound thinkers on the Left, shares his views on the world with Israeli TV. In doing so, he also divulges a hitherto unknown artistic talent. Watch it all and be amazed!

“Bare months after the U.N. finally suspended Libya’s Col. Muammar Qaddafi from its Human Rights Council, North Korea wins the propaganda coup of heading the world’s disarmament agency,” the executive director of UN Watch Hillel Neuer said in a statement protesting the move. “It’s asking the fox to guard the chickens, and damages the U.N.’s credibility.”

Damages the U.N.’s credibility? What credibility is there left to damage?

(h/t Weaselzippers.net)

Britain: Iran Testing missiles with nuclear capability

http://www.jpost.com/IranianThreat/News/Article.aspx?id=227120
Iran has been carrying out covert ballistic missile tests and rocket launches including testing missiles capable of delivering a nuclear payload, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said on Wednesday.
He told parliament the tests were in clear contravention of UN resolution 1929.

Again, the credibility of the U.N.? But then, after the attack on Libya by (largely) the U.S. and Europe, it’s doubtful that any country would ever give up its nuclear weapons programs.

(h/t Weaselzippers.net)

To think that once it was once only lunatic fringe groups like the John Birchers who were claimed to be crazy for advocating that the U.S. get out of the U.N. Can anyone provide cogent reasons for the U.S. to keep subsidizing this vile organization’s budget today?

The nuclear cat is out of the bag and, unfortunately, it appears to be leading to its inevitable conclusion. It feels like mid-1930s deja-vu all over again, with the inevitability of world war looming and significant parts of the world either enables it or remain powerless to stop it.

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My favorite quotation from Part I, which goes a long way to explaining the green failures:

Consider how Gore looks to the skeptics. The peril is imminent, he says. It is desperate. The hands of the clock point to twelve. The seas rise, the coral dies, the fires burn and the great droughts have already begun. The hounds of Hell have slipped the huntsman’s leash and even now they rush upon us, mouths agape and fangs afoam.

But grave as that danger is, Al Gore can consume more carbon than whole villages in the developing world. He can consume more electricity than most African schools, incur more carbon debt with one trip in a private plane than most of the earth’s toiling billions will pile up in a lifetime — and he doesn’t worry. A father of four, he can lecture the world on the perils of overpopulation. Surely, skeptics reason, if the peril were as great as he says and he cares about it as much as he claims, Gore’s sense of civic duty would call him to set an example of conspicuous non-consumption. This general sleeps in a mansion, and lectures the soldiers because they want tents.

What this tells the skeptics is that Vice President Gore doesn’t really believe the gospel he proclaims. That profits from his environmental advocacy enable his affluent lifestyle only deepens their skepticism of the messenger and therefore of the message. And when they see that the rest of the environmental movement accepts this flagrant contradiction, they conclude, naturally enough, that the other green leaders aren’t as worried as they claim to be. Al Gore’s lifestyle is a test case for the credibility of his gospel — and it fails. The tolerance of Al Gore’s lifestyle by the environmental leadership is a further test — and that test, too, the greens fail.

I’ve noted before that Mr. Bookworm’s greenism fails when we’re on vacation and someone else is paying the energy bills for his daily demand for two or three fresh bath towels. I have no problem with being cheap. I’m cheap, and therefore I conserve energy. I’m also cheap on other people’s behalf — I think its dishonest to save my money on electricity, but to waste someone else’s.

The greens have wrapped themselves up in a mantle of moral superiority, and that’s a tough garment to wear all the time. Their problem is that when they periodically cast that rigid mantle off for their own luxury or convenience, it’s pretty clear that they consider themselves so superior, they don’t even need the garb of moral superiority.

You’ve probably heard that Obama is trying to solicit small donors by holding a raffle, with the prize being a Barack Obama and Joe Biden dinner date. I think we conservatives are making a huge mistake ignoring this raffle. It turns out that one can enter without a donation, and I can’t think of anything more interesting than an all expenses paid visit with those two men. I’m not sure they’d find the evening as delightful as I would, but what the hey, right?

The increasing disconnect between reality and Paul Krugman’s New York Times opinion articles was one of the things that led me to examine conservativism more closely. In addition to disliking Krugman’s ideas, I’ve come to dislike Krugman himself, as his anger, embittered, accusatory, demonizing style is the antithesis of reasoned thinking and argument. Peter Foster seems to agree with me.